Tuesday, July 17, 2007

The Price of Retail

Watch your jaw on the desktop when you read these figures regarding Waterstone's charges to publishers for 'maximizing their books' potential', as reported by The Times.

Emma Barnes of Snow Books has commented before on this blog that in fact Waterstone's operate a sliding scale of charges in order to accommodate small publishers, but the books of small publishers are of course unlikely thus to get the kind of 'maximization' being referred to here, and Anthony Cheetham of Quercus Books is now quoted as saying:

There is a genuine level of exasperation and anxiety in the publishing industry that the booksellers have gone too far down this road. It’s the reader who loses because it’s throttling the distribution of a wider range of high-quality books and [perpetuating] the system whereby you plaster the entire country with copies of the same few books.

'An analytical, and sometimes funny, take on the world of fiction reading, writing and publishing' - The Cerebral Mum'Other than the fact that the lady writes well, with insight, empathy and personality, that she speaks her mind and shies not from confrontation when such is necessary and constructive ... there is really no reason for me to visit her blog' - Alan Kellogg

'Pretty great all the time' - Scott Pack

STORIES

What if you made a different choice, or had a different life?

'The stories in Used to Be are the work of a dazzling writer' - Nuala O'Connor

'One of the finest short story writers in the country' - Neil Campbell

About Me

Elizabeth Baines is a writer of prose fiction and plays. Her latest book is Used to Be, a collection of short stories (Salt). Salt also publish her previous collection, Balancing on the Edge of the World (2007), her novel Too Many Magpies (2009), and a reprint in 2010 of her first novel The Birth Machine. Elizabeth has won prizes for her stories and plays including a Giles Cooper Best Radio Play Award and received Sony radio nominations.